One of the metrics that influences which use-case we develop is the number of hours (or work days) saved by implementing the solution. Just the other day I heard one of the leaders in our BI Community commenting that one particular WebI solution would save a business analyst something like 40 days a year over the current Excel-based method, in prep time alone. This affects the value chain for the service in question by reducing the consumption of resources - labor in this example.
There can be various ways of quantifying what BI can do for you. These include (but are not limited to):
Reduction in stock held with improved supply chain reporting
Reduction in retail wastage thanks to improved store supply ordering
Reduction in food wastage due to good trend reports for restaurant ordering
Saving in hours of production of MI using outdated/traditional methods including hand-collation, spreadsheets, printing, etc.
Improvement in accuracy and timeliness of reports leads to improvement in decision making; think of where decisions would not have been made due to the lack of MI at the time that they were made.
Correct investment decisions based on more up to date market analysis reports, including credit risk and market risk decision facilitation
There are a whole variety of decision making processes that rely on accurate, timely MI reports. It’s difficult to quantify because you won’t always know what would happen if you hadn’t taken the course of action that the decision from the report led to.
@Mark P
Thank you so much for giving these clues!
My data Analysis Center is regarded as cost center, and I think it is due to the fact I have not ‘promoted’ enough our contribution to our management in terms of money…
The trap people often fall into is departmental cross-charging for reports - people will simply manage (badly) with the data they’ve got.
Book a meeting with your team - take an hour to run through the reports, establish who is using them and what they are using them for. What benefits do they get from receiving the report? What would they lose if they didn’t receive that report; the opportunity cost of not receiving the report can sometimes be as good a justification as the revenue gained from other reports.
I really wish people would give more thought what they want from BI and understand the difference between a general report writer and a technical report writer. Having been through a corporate capacity review which has left me and other technical reporters redundant, the points mentioned are all very true and although pointed out to HR, have left the council with no technical reporting capacity (the problem with generic job descriptions).
As a result, the work is going to be pushed onto IT who (1) have no capacity, (2) don’t have the skill set and (3) don’t have the specialist business knowledge. So the work is not going to be done, or worse you’ve got non-specialists producing datasets for other non-specialists to analyse - at least 2 people doing the work a single person used to do with no capacity to do same-day reporting. There was a reason each directorate employed specialist technical reporters…
I can see the council loosing more money from decisions being made on flawed data than they’re going to be saving on salaries. In my case alone, the amount of redundancy pay I shall be getting would have been sufficient to assimilate me on my current Ts & Cs for 5 years+… The amount of skills and institutional knowledge that has been lost is shocking and severely impacts on business capacity.
So do make it clear that the technical reporting skill set is equally important as the non-technical skill set; it may look on paper that it’s a waste to employ technical specialists, but without the in-depth technical and business knowledge to produce the data, the generalists will be writing reports based on flawed data.
@Maddye
Thank you so much for sharing your experiences.
I hope you will find new job where your great in-depth technical knowledge will be appreciated…
(BOB member since 2002-08-20)
(BOB member since 2009-01-09)